


the tinderbox paradox

by kay_cricketed



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: F/M, Post-Film, brief description of graphic violence, implications that illya's mother did things she would rather not to protect her son, potentially uncomfortable parallels drawn between illya's mother and gaby
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-10
Updated: 2018-06-10
Packaged: 2019-05-20 14:20:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14896181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kay_cricketed/pseuds/kay_cricketed
Summary: Illya navigates the roads that Gaby has built for him, unsure of where they lead.





	the tinderbox paradox

**Author's Note:**

  * For [th_esaurus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/th_esaurus/gifts).



> I hope you like this, OP! I really enjoyed your viewpoint of Illya, his mother, and Gaby, so I ended up doing a little mash of a few different things.

**one. a match is both something that burns and completes another**

 

“If we’re going to work together, we ought to have an understanding,” Gaby says. She has brought her own bottle of liquor to Illya’s hotel room, perhaps remembering that he’s unlikely to stock for guests. He drinks, but rarely on the job. The liquid catches gold and brown in the same light, like her eyes.

It is their first mission in this unlikely experiment. Already, Illya is uneasy, certain that cooperation will be short-lived. He should not become used to—this. This organization, U.N.C.L.E., is only a house of cards built to bare what’s in each other’s hands. Flimsy at best. Dangerously flammable at worst.

But Gaby comes into his hotel room. She brings her liquor. She slumps on the richly upholstered sofa and drinks straight from the bottle, framing a chop shop sprawl in designer clothing.

Illya watches her and feels too small for his skin.

“What understanding do you have in mind?” he asks after some consideration, and gently nudges the bishop on the chessboard before him to a more strategic position. He can’t help but think to Italy, to the last time they shared rooms, to the soot prints of her eyelashes as she struggled to stay awake and the heat of her bones settled over his. There is no radio in the room. He doesn’t like the radio, but he had looked for one regardless.

“I don’t want _this_ to drag over into every mission. The last ended so horrendously, and my place with Waverly is precarious as it is.”

He nods, although he doesn’t understand. “This?” he asks politely.

Gaby watches him, too, in the way she always has: assessing, shrewd, restructuring how she believes him to work. “Don’t you think we have unfinished business?” she asks, setting her trap.

Illya thinks that unfinished business is all he has ever had, unless it ends with blood caked like chalk beneath his nails or a gun overheated in his palm. He presses his knuckles to his mouth and studies the chessboard, opting for self-preservation. He wonders, too, if she kept the ring.

After some time, Gaby sighs and lets her head fall back against the sofa. Her hair is coming out of its knot. “How disappointing,” she says.

 

**two. a hearth both opens and closes the home to the wolves**

 

Illya is seven. He is watching his mother as she binds her waist and breasts, shaping her physique into something more resembling perfection. She lets him do this, lets him perch on the calico bedspread as she decorates her face and hair, as she checks her stockings for holes. His textbook is left open across his knees. If he’s patient, she will let him choose her hairpins.

The blue ribbon and mother of pearl—the glass white dove with its wings outstretched—the green beads wrapped around brass. Illya will only know when she is dressed what will be best.

“Does it hurt?” he asks for the first time.

“It does,” she says. “You are too young to know, Illyusha, but someday you will also be asked to press everything inside. Tightly, so tightly you can’t breathe. And you are already growing; you will take up too much space for them to stand, so I fear it will only be worse for you.”

Illya is not so young that he doesn’t know. He says nothing about how little he understands the boys at school and his father’s increasing distance and the way his throat sometimes feels squeezed into a twig. It’s enough that his mother understands and is honest, that they share this, too, in common.

“But there can be control in it,” she continues, checking her profile, her pale hands smoothing down her ribcage. “And control is its own comfort in an unforgiving world. As are you, Illyusha.”

He slips from the bed and comes to her side, pushing his face into her sweet-smelling hair. “I like you without it,” he says honestly. His favorite mother is the one with sun spots and lumpy warmth beneath her nightgown, the easiest to hold to.

She touches the back of his head. “You’ll remember that for the other women in your life, won’t you?”

“Ugh,” he says, and soon forgets everything but the reward of her laughter. 

 

**three. kindling is both expendable and the foundation on which to build**

 

Understanding or not, they have an undeniably successful partnership in the field.

Istanbul leaves raised scars on Illya’s knee and gives Gaby yet another reason to distrust any car she hasn’t taken apart with her own hands. They achieve their objective, limp to what now constitutes as home, debrief to a pleased Waverly, and find themselves outside the building in the drizzling London rain. They look on each other. He would like to pull Gaby’s hair from her cheek and ask her to sleep.

She doesn’t give him the chance. She leaves, and in another week they are together in Argentina, careless and careful with their words at the same time.

Illya finds he would not keep her from this nest of snakes that she willingly beds. She is good at her work, just as Illya is. He—trusts her, at his back. She may betray him, but only when it is suitable that she should, a choice he would approve of if given notice. After Argentina, after Panama, after Paris, she takes note and stops waiting for accusations that will not come. The work comes first; he is only a piece on the board.

Of course, he could not, would not, betray her in any capacity. But she never puts him in a position to prove it; he’s grateful to her for that courtesy, although _courteous_ is not a trait that otherwise applies to her. She is a compact spy with a talent for masking her intentions. She layers her words and their meanings. A consummate liar, Napoleon once remarks, with something approaching admiration.

But Illya wonders. He hesitates to claim that he knows her—though he senses there’s a shape that flutters beneath what she says and does, as though a moth blanketed in the dark is flexing its wings with slow and insidious purpose—because she’ll take any such claim as a challenge. But he knows _of_ her, in a fashion. He’d put her in the right clothes and she recognized that. He’d said some of the right words and she’d said them back.

Even in a world of spies, not everything is a lie. There are truths like hard kernels that bloody the gums. There are two inches between their faces that allow no place to hide. In Italy, when she’d looked down on him from the table and he’d looked up into the light, in that no-man’s land space from nose to nose, Illya thought, _I would unwrap the wall from your back and these stupid men from your ankles, if I knew how._

(He didn’t know how. He’d never figured out the trick, even before, and his mother died under the weight of what the world wanted from her.)

In that same space, Gaby stared at his mouth and his eyes and his throat, all held open for the taking. He couldn’t guess at the exact nature of her thoughts, but he knew, instinctively, that she felt an acute hunger. 

Maybe she recognized how strictly he bound himself up behind caps and jackets and flesh and the tension in his jaw. Maybe she thought, _I like you without it._

Illya would like to burn these ideas from his mind. His feelings are clumsy and unmoored when he thinks on her. Although he doesn’t like the sensation, it is at least better than the anger that pounds behind his skull and ears, relentless, ballooning beyond his ability to draw it back into his body. 

He’s never been as practiced about it as his mother. How Gaby can manage with so much fury and so little space to pack it, he doesn’t know. He imagines brittle rice paper folded into intricate shapes: a miniature maze, a sharp-edged bird, a flower all the same color.

 

**four. a tinderbox is both a container and the spark laid to open air**

 

His father is taken in broad daylight. They leave the house in a brutal sort of disarray, irreparably marked, and Illya is only frightened and grateful they did not do the same to his mother. 

Her lips are pinched hard together, bloodless. She strokes his hair and stares at the trail of water and spilt flowers across the floor, the papers floating in it like frail stepping stones. “None of this will be ours soon,” she tells him. “If there is anything you want to take with you, it will have to be now.”

Illya wants to take the hairpin with a fall of silver thread. He toys with the needles against the flesh of his cheek. 

“Something else,” his mother says, softly.

He picks up his father’s watch and looks to her for approval. She nods and reaches to him, and he offers his hands to her. “A useful thing,” she says, fastening the watch around his wrist in such a way the excess dangles, but not much. “Oh, don’t make such a face. I’ll bring the hairpins and the books and the little cat ornament you love myself, Illyusha. But this, they will let you keep. This, they will let you wear as a reminder of loyalties.”

Illya rubs the surface of the watch under his eye. He is trembling. He realizes he does not know why, only that it isn’t fear, not this resonance that builds and blocks sound and sight. His breathing is fast, clipped.

His mother kisses his forehead. “Remember that I put it on you,” she whispers. 

 

**five. it is the rotten wood that is desperate to catch fire**

 

“You remind me of my mother,” he tells Gaby, when they have known each other a year and he is no longer afraid of her and for her.

Gaby makes a face. “A compliment?”

Illya is taking apart and cleaning the guns. It is the kind of work he enjoys doing with his hands, even if he has two broken fingers, sacrificed to slam a man’s face into the grill of his car earlier in the evening. “She was strong,” he says, deliberating how to explain it—the narrow strait of a woman’s eyes, the unforgiving nature of a face, and how there could still be love in both for him. “She, too, did things she would rather not. But she did them well. In her own making.”

Across from him, Gaby has her bare feet up on the coffee table, toes pressed to the barrel of his gun. She studies him and softens.

She knows something of him, then, after all.

“To protect you,” she says.

Illya stills, giving that thought. He shakes his head. He doesn’t tell her that there was no protection to be had, or that poverty and isolation would have been kinder to a boy than watching his mother say the right words with the right man and the right press of fingertips. He doesn’t tell her that the raw burnt black thing in his belly only grew with time and feedings; it would never starve on his inadequacy, how even now he was wrapped in someone else’s strings. He doesn’t tell her about the first man he’d killed: the violence of it, how he’d used his thumbs and fists and teeth until the hot burst of blood satisfied each, and the shame of it, how he’d stared blankly at the bones forming his feet in a bathtub that barely fit him as the water grew cold, greased, and pink.

How he wonders, sometimes, whether his mother’s advice has done more damage than she’d meant to do him. This pressure in his chest, it’s just the way of living. But there could be—some relief. 

(He still remembers being flayed bare beneath Gaby, closing his eyes for a kiss that wouldn’t come. She had been so light. She had been clean cotton and lumpy warmth, the easiest to hold to.)

He—might tell her. In time.

“Is there a radio?” Gaby asks, when the silence dwindles past her point of patience. She unclips her hair, tugging it free from a pragmatic pin that’s in modern fashion.

Illya stands and crosses the room to it, aware of her eyes on his back, on his neck. “You don't like to dance alone,” he reminds her.

He twists the dial, and in the static, loses what she says to him.


End file.
